November 2006

When I heard this week that a disbarred attorney and his wife were shot in Chappaqua, I assumed it was the Clintons. But it turns out it was the other disbarred attorney and wife on the Clintons’ cul de sac.

Carlos Perez-Olivo was disbarred recently for stealing bail money; his clients were “murder defendants and other violent felons,” according to the New York Daily News. The couple moved to Chappaqua about three months ago.

Asked for comment about their new neighbors’ brush with death, the Clintons said, “We’re just relieved that we’re no longer the slimiest couple on the block.”

The Global Orgasm for Peace was conceived by Donna Sheehan, 76, and Paul Reffell, 55, whose immodest goal is for everyone in the world to have an orgasm Dec. 22 while focusing on world peace.

“The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during it and after it,” Reffell said Sunday. “Your mind is like a blank. It’s like a meditative state. And mass meditations have been shown to make a change.”

The couple are no strangers to sex and social activism. Sheehan, no relation to anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, brought together nearly 50 women in 2002 who stripped naked and spelled out the word “Peace.”

The stunt spawned a mini-movement called Baring Witness that led to similar unclothed demonstrations worldwide.

The couple have studied evolutionary psychology and believe that war is mainly an outgrowth of men trying to impress potential mates, a case of “my missile is bigger than your missile,” as Reffell put it.

Indeed, the United States’ reaction to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan should have been, “Well that’s OK. I’m perfectly comfortable with my penis size and don’t need to go thousands of miles just to prove that mine is bigger than yours.” Then later, as everyone on the Allied side is being loaded into gas chambers: “Is this still about your penis?”

According to the Financial Times, nearly 90 percent of Europeans are convinced that human activity is responsible for global warming. Of course, nearly 90 percent of Europeans are also convinced that Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism.

In a related matter, convinced that regulations have been the cause of their killer drivers’ habits, European cities are doing away with traffic signs, with the hope that it will encourage socially responsible behavior and result in fewer accidents. This has prompted some in Europe to speculate on whether doing away with Jews could encourage tolerant behavior and result in less terrorism.

This month, Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison was the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress. This could have broad implications for American government. After all, a Muslim could finally get the pork out of politics.

UN chief Kofi Annan demanded that world leaders give climate change the same priority as they did to wars and to curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Annan declared: “The message is clear. Global climate change must take its place alongside those threats — conflict, poverty, the proliferation of deadly weapons — that have traditionally monopolised first-order political attention.”

Since we’re in the twilight of Annan’s reign, it’s probably time I let everyone know something about the leader, who once forwarded to the Rwandan government a fax from a Rwandan man informing the UN of a massacre that the same government was to carry out the next day. We haven’t heard from that informant since.

Anyway, here’s what the world should know about how Kofi Annan got his name. Annan was the first Secretary General to have advanced to that position from within the ranks of the UN itself. As a young man, Annan started at the UN’s World Health Organization in 1962, and when the big shots needed a caffeine jolt, they would yell out to the new guy, “Hey — Coffee!”

“Now?”

“Anon! Anon!”

So everyone thought the kid’s name was Coffee Anon, and it stuck (but the spelling was of course “Africanized”).

The Jerusalem Post recently reported that the four Jihadists who recently shot up an Oslo synagogue also planned to kidnap and behead Norway’s Israeli ambassador Miriam Shomrat. Involved were two Pakistani nationals, a Turk and a “Norwegian.”

“Sunday’s shooting came less than a week after an Al Qaida plot targeting the site was uncovered,” JihadWatch reported.

One of the four suspects arrested in Norway on terrorism charges last week was in contact with Princ Dobrosi, a Kosovo Albanian mafia boss that formerly ran the largest European heroin empire from Prague.

According to the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, Dobrosi has established connections with one of the Oslo detainees, Pakistani Arfan Qadeer Bhatti, who headed a four member al-Qaeda group planning attacks on the Israeli and US embassies in Oslo. …Arfan Qadeer Bhatti visited Dobrosi in Pristina, Kosovo, this summer…

Norwegian police ha[ve] been pursuing Dobrosi since 1996 because he escaped from a local prison after bribing a ward who smuggled him out in a van with dirty linen. Fugitive Dobrosi underwent a plastic surgery in Croatia.

According to a Czech daily Mlada fronta Dnes, Bhatti has solicited operational help from a Kosovo Albanian drug-boss Princ Dobrosi in order to plan attacks on the Czhech capital, Prague. …Dobrosi headed the strongest Kosovo Albanian drug mafia gang that was in control of the northern branch of the Balkan route headquartered in the Albanian dominated Serb province of Kosovo. Dobrosi’s gang controlled the distribution of heroin and other drugs from Kosovo to Nordic countries via the Czech Republic.

Various Kosovo Albanian clans maintain distribution branches in other European cities. Dobrosi is the first of the ethnic Albanian drug bosses to admit direct links to al Qaeda.

“Evidence exists that Dobroshi had close connections with Daut Haradinaj, the brother of former Kosovo premier Ramush Haradinaj. Through him Dobroshi controlled drug smuggling on the route Kuks - Pec - Bar and vice-versa,” says Blic’s source, emphasizing that Dobroshi issued an order to assassinate Daut Haradinaj after his brother Ramush began to testify before the Hague tribunal. According to the same source, Interpol has complete documentation regarding Dobroshi’s involvement in operations by extremists, members of criminal groups close to drug barons throughout Kosovo and Metohija with the goal of assuming control over smuggling drugs, white slaves and weapons.

Skender Prushi always keeps the tiny Koran in his trouser pocket for safekeeping. Before opening it, he washes his hands and puts the book on his forehead and on his heart.

The book, which is 2.68 cm long, 2.16 cm wide and 1.09 cm thick, has been in his family for generations. Now 64 years old, Prushi wants to keep a promise he gave his father 26 years ago and send the Koran to a museum worthy of its holiness and value.

“Men in my family never lived past 70, and my children and my brother’s children did not come under the full influence of religion,” said the chain-smoking Prushi.

“So I am ready to sell the Koran at an auction. I’d be happy if it went to a museum either in the Arab or the Western world.”

….[Prushi’s] family converted to Islam [from Catholicism], producing several high ranking Muslim clerics. Skender Prushi’s father Halim, an officer of Albania’s King Zog in the 1930s, knew Arabic. He kept the book on himself as a talisman, reading from it to family and trusted friends even after the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha [of Albania] banned religion in the late 1960s.

In a harrowing incident involving Hoxha’s men knocking on Prushi’s door, Prushi had to deny the Koran’s existence, ”and the next day jumped on a relative’s coal truck heading for the Kosovo border. By midnight, the Koran was in safe hands in the Teke (Islamic monastery) in the historic Kosovo town of Prizren.”

On 2 November, a group of Wahhabis disrupted a prayer in a mosque in Novi Pazar, the largest town of the region of Sandzak, which stretches along both sides of the border between Serbia and Montenegro. The incident deteriorated into a mass fistfight between the Wahhabis and adherents of traditional Balkan Islam. Shots were fired both inside and outside the mosque and the imam himself was attacked.

Sandzak is a region of Serbia that I mentioned in two recentposts. More from the Monday article:

“Wahhabis are taking over Bosnia,” said the cover of last week’s issue of Dani, a Sarajevo-based newsmagazine. The weekly, which addresses largely Bosniak secular audiences, also highlighted numerous other incidents, some fatal, involving Wahhabis….During the war…a process of tangible radicalization was under way in some parts of central Bosnia and later Sandzak….Security forces and reporters, both local and international, tackled in their own ways things like alleged terrorist plots, suspects taken to Guantanamo Bay, murders committed by Wahhabis, and Bosniak girls pulled out of school into forced marriages with Wahhabis.

…The only truly new element…was the Bosniak feeling of victimhood. …[T]his newly acquired taste on the part of Bosnia’s largest ethnic group for taking offense quickly and loudly narrowed down public space for thoughtful analysis of the phenomenon.

The Bosniaks’ friends in the West — including human-rights activists, politicians, journalists, and academics — didn’t help either. Many still sport patronizingly benevolent attitudes toward Bosniaks, attitudes that perhaps speak of friendship as much as the lack of respect for the befriended. For them, any controversial issues having to do with Bosniaks and Islam are not to be tackled. What was permitted, however, was an affirmative discourse that endlessly revisits Bosnia’s centuries-old tolerance, its moderate Islam and its “people just like us.” The cheesier takes still often deteriorate into musing on the beauty of Bosnian women…[as Richard Gere just did].

From the English version of the Belgrade daily Politika:

Muslim religious dignitaries in Bosnia…are calling on believers to reject Wahhabi teachings, even though state institutions there continue to tolerate that movement. It has long been suspected that a number of Wahhabis are present in Raska district [Sandzak] and in Kosovo-Metohija. It is not known how many of them there are, but recent events in Novi Pazar point to an urgent need to take action to protect citizens from violence perpetrated by members of that movement.

Perhaps the Bosnians, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton should have thought twice before throwing their support behind al Qaeda-linked fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic to be president of Bosnia and our “partner for peace.” And perhaps the Croats and Balkan Muslims should have thought twice before depicting the entire conflict as one brought on by Serbs, and the West should have thought thrice before buying and reselling that propaganda. Bosniaks’ nationalism allied them with the mujahideen, who were flown in with our and Iran’s help, and today Bosniaks suffer the inevitable, forseeable, predictable, hackneyed consequences of that alliance.

Look for it to only get worse. Because with the “assistance” and “advice” that George W. Bush is currently seeking from the likes of James Baker (who in the Balkans is in line with Clinton, Clark, Albright, Holbrooke and Berger), we will likely continue the destruction of Serbia by turning the whole area over to the Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians, achieving “Peace in Our Time.”

Last month the AP reported that “thousands of people have been mistakenly linked to names on terror watch lists when they crossed the border, boarded commercial airliners or were stopped for traffic violations, a government report said Friday.”

People “are usually misidentified because they have the same name as someone in the database….Young children and well-known Americans like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., were stopped at airports because their names were the same as those on the no-fly list.

“The list has contained the names of Bolivia’s President Evo Morales and Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker, according to a report by CBS’ ‘60 Minutes.’”

Bolivia, Lebanon and Ted Kennedy: So where’s the malfunction? It seems the “faulty” computer knows which side of terror people are on better than the people themselves do.

As for the rest of the list, maybe people — especially if they live in Western countries — should stop being named after terrorists? Muslims need to stop naming their kids after martyrs and start naming them after Jewish doctors. Besides, say you’re living in America now (or Canada). So how about doing like other immigrant groups — who want to “be American” — do, and naming your kids Susan, Danielle, Sammy, Jennifer and so on? How many Italian-Americans still name their kids Rodolfo or Graziella? Russian-Americans, for example, name their kids Brandon and other names from “90210.” Why is that not good enough for Middle Easterners? They should try acting like real Americans, and watching the latest TV shows and naming their kids Haley, Tyler, Skyler and Dylan. What’s the problem? The name thing is just another telltale sign of who does or doesn’t want to integrate.

Anyway, for those who are offended by the computer glitches (if you want to call them that), take heart in this finding: “Terrorist screening missed 75% of time: Green card and visa applications not checked against terror watch list.”

A victory for civil rights warriors, and proof that there is balance in the universe!

Today BBC aired a radio documentary on the conservative comedy movement in America, for which I was interviewed. It will be archived for exactly one week starting today. To listen, click here and scroll down alphabetically to “The Comic Battle for America.”